Opal hush

7.782-3: What do you think really of that hermetic crowd,
the opal hush poets: A. E. the mastermystic? That Blavatsky woman started it.

In the latest issue of the Dublin James Joyce Journal (No. 5, 2012) I have published a piece
tracking the history of the Opal Hush poets to an article in the Leader.1
Almost as soon as it appeared I came across examples of more general
application of the term, including a mixed drink attributed to Yeats. To begin
with the critical label, evidence that this still had some circulation after
the publication of Ulysses can be
found in a review in the March 1925 issue of the Irish quarterly Studies. The book under discussion is In the Land of Youth by James Stephens,
and the review is signed W.D. — clearly William Dawson, who as ‘Avis’ was one
of the Leader’s best-known
columnists. Dawson complains about what he describes as Stephens’s ‘wild and
whirling words’, giving as an instance the phrase‘Green soundless thunders’, about which he
comments ‘we have had nothing in Anglo-Irish literature to equal this since the
historic “opal hush” of a quarter of a century back.’

If we return to the palmy days when the term was first
coined, we find it very quickly moving in a new direction. Edward Thomas, the
future war poet, complained about ‘lovers of the Celt’, describing them as:

a class of "decadents",
not unrelated to Mallarmé, and of aesthetes, not unrelated to Postlethwaite.
They are sophisticated, neurotic — the fine flower of sounding cities — often
producing exquisite verse and prose; preferring creme de menthe and opal hush to metheglin or stout.

Beautiful Wales (London: A & C Black, 1905), p. 11

Frustratingly, Thomas says nothing more about the drink,
but Arthur Ransome shortly provided the answer:

As soon as the
shaking of hands was all over someone asked Gypsy for a song. "Got very little
voice to-night," she coughed, "and everybody wants something to drink first.
But I’ll sing you a song afterwards." She went through to the table with the
glasses in the inner room. "Who is for opal hush?" she cried, and all, except
the American girl and the picture dealer, who preferred whisky, declared their
throats were dry for nothing else. Wondering what the strange-named drink might
be, I too asked for opal hush, and she read the puzzlement in my face. "You
make it like this," she said, and squirted lemonade from a syphon into a glass
of red claret, so that a beautiful amethystine foam rose shimmering to the
brim. "The Irish poets over in Dublin called it so; and once, so they say, they
went all round the town and asked at every public-house for two tall cymbals
and an opal hush. They did not get what they wanted very easily, and I do not
know what a tall cymbal may be. But this is the opal hush." It was very good,
and as I drank I thought of those Irish poets, whose verses had meant much to
me, and sipped the stuff with reverence as if it had been nectar from Olympus.

Bohemia
in London
(1907), ch. 4 'A Chelsea Evening', p. 60

This passage is recalled in a biography of Ransome, which
adds the name of the putative inventor of the drink:

In a studio near The
Boltons he drank in awe a concoction christened 'opal hush' by W. B.
Yeats (claret diluted with lemonade out of a siphon).

Whether or not Yeats actually invented the drink, its
popularity in London aesthetic circles, somewhat outside the ambit of the Leader, strongly suggests that the ‘opal
hush’ label was quickly adopted as an in-joke among its intended targets.

Another imbiber in Ransome’s bohemian circles was Pamela
Colman Smith, aka ‘Pixie’, and famous as the designer of the Waite Tarot cards.

The assembled guests
chanted songs and poetry, listened raptly to the Jamaican tales of Brer
Annancy, criticized each other’s art and writings, and refreshed themselves
with an Irish drink called "Opal Hush", concocted from lemonade and
claret

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1The words first gained circulation as the result of a crushingly witty review in
the Leader (19 December, 1903) of the Christmas 1903 issue of the
Irish Homestead. Among the small collection of poems anthologised in the
IH was one by Alberta Victoria Montgomery, entitled 'Grey'. The
Leader cast a glaring spotlight on the line 'The opal hush lies on the
cloud bars bright' and a catch-phrase was born. (This subject was originally raised within the private online discussion group “Ulysses for
Experts”.)